1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a test apparatus for testing a mobile communication terminal such as cell phone or mobile terminal, and a method for displaying a message associated with the testing.
2. Description of the Related Art
When a communication terminal such as cell phone is newly developed, a test needs to be done as to whether the developed communication terminal can normally operate in an actual use environment. However, it is so difficult to exchange communication information for various tests between the newly-developed communication terminal and an operating actual base station and thereby to test whether the newly-developed communication terminal can normally operate.
Thus, there is known a test apparatus for testing whether the newly-developed communication terminal can normally operate when the newly-developed communication terminal is connected to a pseudo base station having a base station function and various items of communication information are exchanged between the communication terminal and the pseudo base station. The document disclosing the test apparatus therein is JP-A 2008-193314 (KOKAI), for example. The test apparatus has a trace function of acquiring various messages exchanged between a mobile communication terminal to be tested and a pseudo base station and displaying the same as trace information indicating a communication history on a display. The trace function is used to display and output a plurality of items of detailed and time-sequential log information of the communication information as the trace information, thereby easily discovering an abnormality occurrence cause when the mobile communication terminal to be tested cannot normally operate.
In recent years, W-CDMA (Wideband-Code Division Multiple Access) or its next-generation communication standard called LTE (Long Term Evolution) has been introduced as a communication standard of mobile communication terminals to further enhance the speed of communication. Under such a situation, the amount of messages exchanged between the pseudo base station and the mobile communication terminal and the amount of trace information necessary to be processed per unit time increase.
However, a conventional test apparatus can only display a large amount of messages exchanged for test in time sequence, and thus there is a problem that it is difficult for a tester to find a desired message and visibility is poor.